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Black
women writers put their brand on the suspense genre
By: Denise Hamilton, special to the Los
Angeles Times
Published January 20, 1999
Similar to the 'old school' and Harlem Renaissance authors
earlier in the century, African American mystery writers
today are conjuring up an enticing selection of works. This
new group constitutes the . . .Noir Wave
At age 7, Gar Anthony Haywood began picking up the books
with lurid covers that he found scattered around his father's
bedroom. Science fiction, mystery and detective novels—Haywood
soon devoured them all, but even as a youngster, he wondered:
Why aren't any of these characters black like me?
Years later, Haywood discovered there was a handful of African
American noir writers from the '40s and '50s known as the
"old school" of black detective fiction.
"I read some Chester Himes and picked up ['In the Heat
of the Night'], whose character Virgil Tibbs was black,
even though the author wasn't. But other than that, there
weren't any, and I didn't understand why. I thought the
field could use some people of color."
So Haywood decided to write his own.
"Fear of the Dark," which featured unflappable
South-Central private investigator Aaron Gunner, was published
in 1988 after Haywood won a competition sponsored by the
Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin's Press for
best first detective fiction.
More than a decade later, Haywood has released his sixth
book in the Aaron Gunner series, "When Last Seen Alive."
A second series by the author, featuring a retired pair
of amateur sleuths named Joe and Dottie Loudermilk, who
cruise the West in their Airstream trailer solving mysteries,
has also debuted.
Haywood may not be as well-known in mainstream publishing
as, say, Walter Mosley, but he is part of an explosion in
black detective and noir fiction that has taken the publishing
world by storm in the last couple of years.
"Until 1988, there were fewer than 10 or 15, and some
of those were only published in very obscure publications
or black newspapers and periodicals," says Richard
Yarborough, an associate professor of English at UCLA who
will be offering a seminar on black mystery writing in the
spring. "Since 1988, we've had 25 to 30 new black mystery
writers, and frequently they have published six to eight
books each. That's huge."
The reasons for this growth are varied, but for starters,
the genre, although highly regimented, has historically
allowed authors to comment on a variety of racial, cultural
and societal issues, and that is appealing to many of these
new writers. Indeed, even O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher
Darden is working on a mystery.
"We're all fascinated with evil and wrongdoing and
seeing people brought to justice, but for African Americans,
that sense of seeing wrongs righted is very powerful because,
historically, we haven't always seen that happen in our
lives," says Paula L. Woods, whose debut work of fiction,
"Inner City Blues" (W.W. Norton) was published
this month.
Gary Phillips, whose most recent book, "Bad Night Is
Falling," explores the city's tensions between blacks
and Latinos through the firebombing death of Mexican immigrants
in a Los Angeles housing project, has a slightly different
take.
"Where else can I tell all these tales of political
corruption and racial animus but in the mystery detective
novel?" he asks.
Phillips' protagonist, Ivan Monk (inspired by Thelonius),
reflects the cultural diversity of his hometown. Monk is
a black private investigator who owns a doughnut shop and
lives in Silver Lake with his girlfriend, a Japanese American
judge. His cases often start in the inner city and take
Monk from downtown to the harbor and everywhere in between.
"What I'm doing has a historical root that goes all
the way back to Dashiell Hammett's 'Red Harvest,' "
Phillips says. "You've always had a lot of politics
in mystery novels."
Phillips' background helps him mine this rich vein. The
43-year-old grew up in South-Central when it was middle
class, before the jobs disappeared and the economic structure
collapsed. A longtime political activist and self-described
"hoodlum intellectual," Phillips is the former
host of a talk show on KPFK-FM (90.7) and is a founding
director of the downtown-based Multicultural Collaborative,
a nonprofit organization that works to improve race relations
and enact public policy.
In the grass-roots style that typifies Phillips, his first
book, "Violent Spring," which was set against
the backdrop of the 1992 L.A. riots, was brought out by
a small press called West Coast Crime that Phillips helped
launch to publish mysteries with a political edge.
"They were looking for partners, and I put in $3,500
and a lot of sweat equity," Phillips says. "I
have a degree in graphic design, so I drew and designed
the covers and helped market and distribute them. We sent
them out for review, we did publication parties, we even
went on mini-tours."
The hard work paid off: Phillips' books were picked up for
mass-market reprinting by Berkley's PrimeCrime Press, a
division of Penguin Putnam.
But Phillips isn't quitting his day job quite yet. He was
recently dropped by Berkley because sales of his books were
slow, a company spokeswoman said.
That irks Phillips, who says mainstream publishers just
don't know how to market to black audiences.
"They market it for white folks who buy hardcover books,
but not everyone reads [books on] the New York Times Bestseller
List," Phillips says.
But Gerry Howard, editor in chief for trade paperbacks at
Doubleday, says most mysteries don't make the New York Times
list anyway. Howard, who edited Mosley and Woods while at
W.W. Norton, says the key to sales is positioning.
For him, that includes taking out ads in black publications,
sending the novel to those on select mailing lists, booking
authors onto black-oriented TV shows and doing signings
in cities with large African American populations.
"You do exactly what you do with white detective fiction,"
Howard says. "You try to find the people who will respond
to it. By now there's a real brotherhood and sisterhood
of black crime writers, so there's already a sort of tribal
drum set up."
UCLA's Yarborough says that black writers may suffer from
the fact that sales patterns tend to be different in the
black book-buying community, starting more slowly and spreading
steadily through word-of-mouth instead of the big initial
peaks that publishers aim for.
Still, word is getting out.
At Eso Won Books, a black-owned bookstore in the Crenshaw
district that specializes in books by and for African Americans,
white fans often show up when a black mystery author is
scheduled to read.
"Our black customers are definitely happy to see black
characters, but as writers get known, white readers buy
the books too," Eso Won co-owner James Fugate says.
While Mosley remains the best-known (and bestselling) crossover
example of black detective fiction, the genre's rich history
dates back 100 years, says Woods, who, in addition to writing
her novel, edited the 1995 compilation "Spooks, Spies
and Private Eyes, Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction
of the 20th Century" (Doubleday).
Woods' anthology is a rich primer for those who want a historical
grounding in the genre and reflects years of research among
back issues of long-defunct magazines and out-of-print titles.
Among the revived gems in "Spooks, Spies" is Pauline
E. Hopkins' classic locked-room mystery story "Talma
Gordon," which was originally published by Colored
American Magazine in 1900.
The Harlem Renaissance writers of the '30s—more known for
poetry and lofty prose than hard-boiled fiction—are represented
by Rudolph Fisher, who penned the 1932 classic, "The
Conjure-Man Dies," the first known detective novel
to feature a black protagonist.
Woods also includes Himes' crime-busting duo Coffin Ed Johnson
and Grave Digger Jones, who sleuthed their way through the
black literary scene from the 1950s to the 1980s. She then
moves to such mainstream, nongenre writers as Richard Wright
and Ann Petry, then into contemporary turf with Mosley,
BarbaraNeely and Eleanor Taylor Bland.
"There's a real hunger on the part of all kinds of
readers of all races to get those perspectives on the black
experience, and Mosley's popularity has paved the way on
the part of publishers to say, 'We'd like to have one like
that, or two or three,' " Woods says.
There's a desire to rediscover the past masters too. W.W.
Norton is publishing the "Old School Book" series,
which reprints classic but unsung novels by black authors
in the post-World War II era that were often cut and altered
by their original publishers. The first in the series, Himes'
"Yesterday Will Make You Cry," was originally
published in a bowdlerized version as "Cast the First
Stone."
Today's black writers are also expanding away from the gritty
urban canon of authors such as Donald Goines and Iceberg
Slim, whose 1969 classic, "Pimp, the Story of My Life,"
has sold more than 6 million copies in numerous languages,
according to its publisher, Holloway House.
Woods says the success of mega-selling black authors such
as Terry McMillan and Alice Walker have opened the doors
for other writers to create unique characters of their own.
Woods' own character, LAPD homicide detective Charlotte
Justice, comes from an upper-middle-class family. Charlotte's
mother, a fourth-generation Angeleno, claims membership
in the "blue vein society," an unofficial social
register of African Americans whose skin tone is light enough
to see the blue veins beneath.
Haywood's Aaron Gunner is also middle class, although "I
also try to attach some issues near and dear to my heart,
like the reemergence of black militancy, gangs in the inner
city and [problems between] the African American community
and the LAPD," Haywood says.
There is no formula today for black detective fiction other
than the standard parameters that dictate the genre. Black
writers have mastered this and added their own twists.
As a result, BarbaraNeely's protagonist is a black maid
named Blanche White who solves murders on the side in books
such as "Blanche Cleans Up" and "Blanche
on the Lam" (Viking).
"[Her being a maid] is a very significant figure for
blacks that doesn't carry the same connection for white
readers," says Yarborough, who also directs the university's
Center for African-American Studies.
John Ridley, whose hard-boiled noir fiction has been called
Jim Thompson-meets-Elmore Leonard, features a down-at-the-heels
black Hollywood screenwriter named Jefty Kittridge in his
new book, "Love Is a Racket."
Although he writes from the grifter's street perspective,
Ridley's background begs to differ: He has a degree in East
Asian culture and languages from New York University and
has written for film and TV shows such as "Martin,"
"The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and "The John
Larroquette Show."
Ridley's first novel, "Stray Dogs," was made into
the 1998 Oliver Stone movie "U-Turn" (Ridley also
wrote the screenplay), and the 33-year-old received a "seven-figure
advance" from Knopf for his two-book deal.
"Hollywood is my day job, what I do to support myself
in the style I've become accustomed to, but the difference
between writing for Hollywood and writing literature is
the difference between crawling over broken glass and flying,"
Ridley says.
Then there is author Nikki Baker, whose sleuth is a black
lesbian. Penny Mickelbury's heroine is a black lawyer. Robert
Greer's novels are set among the African American community
in Denver. Taylor Bland's books take place in a small town
in the Midwest. Hugh Holton's protagonist is a Chicago policeman.
Terris McMahan Grimes' novels unfold in Sacramento. Valerie
Wilson Wesley's character is a single mother and private
eye in Newark, N.J. "White Chocolate" (Forge),
a new novel by Elizabeth Bowman, involves a biracial woman
who gets pulled into solving a mystery because of her ethnic
identity.
"I suspect that soon we'll have a gay black male detective,"
Yarborough says, "although I haven't found him yet." |
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